RSS Hits the Big Time

For each of the near term reporting requirements (major communications, formula block grant allocations, weekly reports) agencies are required to provide a feed (preferred: Atom 1.0, acceptable: RSS) of the information so that content can be delivered via subscription.

The document is very clear that the items in the feed can’t simply be unstructured text, but have to be reusable data, e.g.:

Amount of federal government’s obligation or contingent liability, in dollars. A negative number represents a decrease in funding.

int(11)

Recipient DUNS

Unique nine-digit number issued by Dun & Bradstreet to the agency. Followed by an optional DUNS Plus 4 which allows an agency to submit different bank account data for a single DUNS (Assigned by Dun & Bradstreet)

Aaron, a few minutes ago, I tried to subscribe to the PCCC list via submission of the form on the page to which you linked, but I received an error message that showed something about an incomplete form (I think I saw something about “do you want to volunteer?” flash) before being redirected to a Google Spreadsheets page which informed me that “Something bad happened. Don’t worry, though. The Spreadsheets Team has been notified and we’ll get right on it.”

Update: The PCCC homepage has a slightly-abbreviated version of the form that can be reached by following the “Stay in the loop with the PCCC” link on the homepage. The abbreviated version is missing the “do you want to volunteer” question, and answering that question is mandatory for form submission.